Studio Daingean was established as part of a MArch Year 1 Studio at UCD Architecture. Working with representatives of the local community students made strategic and detailed propositions of the future of Daingean town.

The town is undergoing slow social, economic and physical change and is surrounded by bog landscape – a landscape which is either being protected and therefore “frozen” or else is becoming the site of new large windfarm projects. Students work to understand, discuss and propose a future for this town using its built resources and potential.

The project was established to examine appropriate future ways in which the people of this town might use their built environment and landscape to offer socially and economically sustainable futures for its inhabitants.

The drawings below are by five students who worked under the title TAKING BACK THE BOGS. The students sought to resist the current plan to use imported windmills on the local Bog to “make use” of the redundant bog landscape. The group were concerned that where once the bog was productive and worked by and for the local community the new use, while ostensibly environmentally sound, required little or no involvement of the community. The Bog would now lie beside the town but as an object of curiosity and irrelevance.

The student group instead sought to understand other potentials of the Bog, firstly organising a conglomorate of productive uses around an abandoned Bog concrete warehouse. Timber mills using crops slow-grown on the bog would make useful items and produce an alternative power source by making wood pellets. The Bog is also considered an area of intense international research and productive to grow crops for use in other industries such as cosmetics. Finally one student proposes forms of occupation and dwelling on the sensitive bog landscape.

Two other groups worked in the environs of Daingean. One group worked in the town centre and made interventions to support and sustain it. The final group worked to release landscape and infrastructural assets of Daingean focusing on the Canal and the Bogs.